t started with a picture I saw in the local paper about making crackers from scratch. I saved it, but then never found it again. But I kept thinking...how do you make crackers? And how would they taste different? So I decided to experiment. It was right before we were having lentil soup for dinner, and I was out of bread, and I had nothing to lose, so I thought "Oh, what the heck." I did a quick search online and was disturbed by the complexity of the recipes I found there. One said don't mix too hard. Another said mix for 7 minutes. Some used milk and eggs, and others said let it sit for hours before you bake. Some said cook on low heat for a long time, and others said cook for a short time on high heat. Well, you know me...I wanted the quickest, easiest, no-fuss option, so I pulled the essence out of the recipes I saw and came up with this simple recipe.

How good were they? Well, after a few Uncle Cracker jokes, there were shocked, respectful, and delighted comments, filled with awe. Lucia asked for them repeatedly for snacks. Eve asked me to make them all the time. Maya came home the next day from New York and, as my pickiest eater, reluctantly and suspiciously tried one. First she asked for the recipe to make for her smug married dinner parties in the city. Then, she found the last cracker, which Lucia had left sitting out after taking a few bites (and which was probably licked by the cat a few times)...and she ate that! The whole batch lasted exactly 24 hours.

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After our great jaunt to Imanta in Mexico, it was a short hop to Los Angeles (plane and packing tips for little ones to follow in another post). Before we had a baby my husband and I mostly used to stay in Hollywood but nowadays we prefer Santa Monica for all of the beachside entertainment and people watching, not to mention its proximity to Venice, where most of close friends in town live.

We set up camp at the Shangri-la hotel, an Art Deco landmark on Ocean and Arizona that we fell in love with last year for its location, friendly service and boutique, without being too slick, feel. (I am not its only fan; check out this review in The New York Times). This year they had opened Suite 700, a rooftop bar (half enclosed and half outdoors with great views over the city) and gas fire pits to keep you warm on the wraparound terrace. It was the perfect spot for an impromptu get together and was baby-friendly enough for Jacopo to hang out for a while (with French fries and pretty girls as the main distraction) before he headed off to our room with the great babysitter my friend Sarah Robarts set me up with. One of the keys of traveling with an infant is to ask your local friends for childcare recommendations in their town well in advance. It is always nice to know they work for a family you know and often are more reasonable than the services hotels set up.

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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

During the State of the Union address earlier this week, President Barack Obama spoke at length about clean energy, with nary a mention of climate change. This is the new environment in which America's energy policy is being made.

Just two years ago, Democrats were rallying to combat climate change, one of the most worrying challenges the country faces. But now, Obama has apparently given up his plan to openly fight climate change during his presidency. It's hard to imagine how, even in a second term, he would choose to re-fight the lost battle to create a cap-and-trade system.

The Obama Administration has instead resorted to a sort of insurgent strategy. Instead of waging an all-out battle against energy interests, the U.S. government will try to chip away at the edges of the industry's power and rally citizens' allegiances to a new flag, that of "clean energy."

Climate bill's absence is smothering clean energy

Since Washington hasn't succeeded at tackling climate change head on, Obama's new strategy is to attack the problem obliquely by promoting innovation in clean energy and setting goals for the use of technologies like electric cars. But can clean energy efforts and innovations thrive in the absence of a wholesale climate policy? When a climate bill was still a possibility, clean energy entrepreneurs were promising substantial investments in the sector, if only Congress could give them a framework. And as Monica Potts explains at The American Prospect, in the absence of a climate bill, clean energy has flagged:

What's been problematic about the president's approach up to now is that, despite his efforts to pump funding into the clean-energy sector, as he did with about $90 billion of the stimulus, renewable energy hasn't taken off. Obama had a line in his speech that summed up why this is so: "Now, clean-energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean-energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they're selling."

Short on influence

It's possible that clean energy investors will take the President's new promise as incentive enough to push forward. But, they will also have to consider the influence of the newly empowered Republicans. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard isn't convinced that the president's new tactic will stick:

"There are plenty of people--and most of them happen to be Republicans--who don't think that policies to support clean energy are worthwhile and who will oppose any attempt to move away from them," she wrote. "Meanwhile, this latest iteration of the Obama climate and energy plan includes few of the driving forces that would actually make renewables cost-competitive in the near future and allow renewables to compete (the big one being, of course, a price on carbon pollution)."

When "clean" energy includes coal

Another weak point in the President's new strategy is his reliance on the vague idea of clean energy, which becomes dirtier the more it is used. As Sheppard writes, "Environmental groups weren't all that excited about the inclusion of "clean coal" and nuclear in that mix, but that's pretty broadly expected as the price one must pay to draw broader support for a clean energy standard."

Another key source of clean energy is natural gas. In Washington, it's become a given that natural gas, which releases less carbon when burned than coal or oil, will help the country transition away from its high-carbon diet and be phased out as energy sources like solar and wind become more viable. (The natural gas industry, of course, doesn't see its role as transitional. It's playing for keeps.)

And while some places are rightly celebrating the freedom that natural gas gives them from coal--as Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Penn State is investing $35 million to convert its coal-fired power plant to natural gas over the next three years--other places are bearing the environmental toll of this new, clean fuel. In North Carolina, for instance, hydrofracking, the controversial technique that natural gas companies have been using to extract the gas from shale, is not even legal, but already environmental groups are having to fight efforts from energy companies to buy up potentially gas-rich properties, Public News Service reports.

A poverty of political capital

The president's new strategy on clean energy will surely succeed at turning current energy economy slowly towards a new path. In the absence of any overarching strategy to fix the country's energy problems, it's going to have to be good enough. But ultimately, this sort of tactic, born out of a poverty of political capital, cannot move fast enough to keep energy companies from scouring the earth for more profits doing what they've been doing.

That means that there will be more scenes like the one in Kern County, California, where companies are dredging up the last resources of oils from the tar sands. In Orion Magazine, Jeremy Miller writes:

The land also reveals the Frankensteinian scars and machinery necessary to keep up that level of production. Gas flares glow on hillsides. Nodding donkeys lever over thousands of wells, some of which are spaced fewer than a hundred feet apart. Between the wells and imposing cogeneration power plants--which supply energy and steam to the senescent fields--run wild tangles of pipe. These are the conduits of an elaborate industrial life-support system, breathing in steam and carrying away oil.

Will the president's new strategy prevent the creation of more landscapes like this one? It seems overly optimistic to hope so.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

Arizona lawmakers are expected to introduce an "anchor baby" bill today that would deny birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Modeled after birthright citizenship legislation unveiled by the nativist coalition State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI) earlier this month, the measure is, unabashedly, part of a larger effort on the part of SLLI to challenge existing citizenship law in the United States.

Lawmakers from Georgia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and South Carolina have likewise committed to introducing citizenship bills at the state level, while legislators from Nebraska, Indiana, Colorado, Texas and others are determined to implement similarly controversial Arizona-style enforcement measures in their states.

In recent years, communities that implemented harsh anti-immigrant laws have experienced a number of economic and social repercussions which lawmakers continue to overlook in their determination to tighten enforcement. But as nativist policies bleed public coffers and anti-immigrant political speech incites new strains of ethnic violence, the stark consequences of such extremism are becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Devastating local economies

The legal costs of defending constitutionally questionable laws like SB 1070 ought to be obvious. Arizona, which has the rare luxury of drawing from a $3.6 million donor-endowed legal defense fund, spent upwards of $500,000 defending 1070 from legal challenges last year, and could, in the long-term, spend as much $10 million, according to New America Media's Valeria Fernández.

Yet the think-tank Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)--a major supporter of anti-immigrant laws like SB 1070 and birthright citizenship bills--obstinately underplays the financial fall-out of such measures. Ira Mehlman, a national spokesperson for FAIR, reportedly told New America Media that "the costs of litigations pale in comparison to the cost of communities providing healthcare, education and welfare for undocumented immigrants and their citizen children."

Considerable evidence suggests otherwise. The Brookings Institution, the Udall Center for Public Policy and former President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors have all concluded that immigrants contribute much more to their local economies (through taxes and spending) than they take out through social services (about $800,000 more).

Now, a new report by Southern Poverty Law Center (which, incidentally, has listed FAIR as a hate group since 2007) argues that anti-immigrant laws--not immigrants--have a greater track record of depressing local economies. Gebe Martinez at Campus Progress sums up what happened to five communities "that threw anti-immigration statutes onto their books without fully considering their impact." He writes:

• Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the leader of the court fights for local immigration enforcement, is in the tank for at least $2.8 million with some estimates totaling $5 million as it defends its ordinance all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Riverside, New Jersey suffered a local economic downturn before the city rescinded its anti-immigrant ordinance and welcomed the return of immigrants.
• Farmers Branch, Texas, has spent nearly $4 million in legal fees and is expected to spend at least $5 million to defend its anti-immigration statute with no end in sight.
• Prince William County, Virginia dramatically scaled back a tough immigration statute after realizing the original version would cost millions to enforce and defend in court.
• Fremont, Nebraska, increased the city's property tax to help pay the legal fees for its anti-immigration ordinance which it intends to defend.A

A spate of state-level birthright citizenship bills stands to be similarly costly, as the admitted goal of their sponsors is to force numerous court cases that challenge the conventional applications of the 14th amendment--legislation through litigation. But there are other expenses as well. If such legislation were to pass, government agencies would bear the incredibly costly burden of making citizenship determinations for every child born in the United States--a logistical nightmare that neither federal nor state governments are prepared to undertake.

Fueling ethnic violence

As economically devastating as these divisive measures can be, their social impact on communities is often even greater. Politicians bent on enacting anti-immigrant legislation frequently rely on hateful speech and pejorative language to foment public discontent and, in so doing, build citizen support for their measures--with tragic consequences.

Colorlines.com has repeatedly reported on the correlation between bigoted political speech, anti-immigrant legislation, and ethnic violence. Now, Mónica Novoa reports that a new study from the University of Maryland corroborates the connection. Charting the use of anti-immigrant slurs in newspapers and wire services over the last three decades, the study revealed that "a spike in usage of the dehumanizing slurs usually coincided with contentious immigration policy proposals."

The correlation persists despite the fact that more than 15 years ago, four professional journalism associations--National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association and National Association of Black Journalists--advised their members to stop using the phrase "illegal alien" on the grounds that is is "pejorative," "grammatically incorrect and crosses the line by criminalizing the person, not the action they are purported to have committed."

While incendiary rhetoric may be an effective way of garnering political support for controversial measures, it all too often fuels violence. Going back to New America Media, Fernández notes that this destructive cycle frequently makes for tragic consequences, as in the case of a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly murdered by members the Minuteman Project, an armed, volunteer border patrol organization. The Latino advocacy organization Cuentame, in partnership with Brave New Films, similarly emphasizes the link between hate speech and increasing incidents of hate crimes against Latinos:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cFuYJwW1s[/youtube]

Anti-birthright citizenship bills would effectively create an underclass of mostly Hispanic non-citizens. It's an almost certain catalyst for rampant and systemic anti-immigrant discrimination and ethnic violence. As the anti-immigrant lawmakers from Arizona and elsewhere make good on their promises to push a new, more fervent, onslaught of anti-immigrant legislation in 2011, expect the financial and social costs of such extremism to rise further still.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse<. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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